Parent company Time Inc US was acquired by American media conglomerate Meredith in December, but Time Inc UK had already been put up for sale prior to that and was not part of the deal. The expectation was that the UK business would be sold off separately by the end of last year.
However, sale talks have dragged on, and although the Meredith deal officially completed at the end of January the Time Inc UK business remains up-for-sale.
Private equity house Epiris has been named as a likely buyer, and has been linked to a potential joint bid together with Sir Bernard Gray, the executive chairman of New Scientist.
Gray was part of a consortium that acquired New Scientist from Reed Business Information last year. Prior to that he led a buy-out of the Times Educational Supplement (TES) from News Corp.
Epiris recently acquired De La Rue's specialist paper business. It is also an investor in Photobox and previous investments included Innovia Group, Bezier and The Stationery Office.
In the past, Epiris has also invested alongside Exponent, the former owner of Immediate Media, which was sold to Hubert Burda just over a year ago.
Separately, PrintWeek has also learned that Time Inc UK is restructuring its group production function, with five out of 11 staff understood to be in the process of taking voluntary redundancy. Production operations director Richard Hill left at the end of last month, with the others who have taken redundancy set to depart over the coming weeks. Hill had been at the business for 28 years.
A source said: "They are effectively halving the team. Circulations may be down but there's still a lot of day-to-day work to do in production."
Time Inc UK's diverse portfolio of titles includes a host of high-profile brands such as Country Life, Marie Claire and Wallpaper*, but in the most recent ABC report some of its weekly titles filed substantial circulation declines: sales of Now! magazine were down 25% to 76,619; while the biggest title in its 'woman' portfolio, Woman's Weekly, posted a sales decline of 8% at 255,288. Sales of Woman and Woman's Own were down 20% and 17% respectively.
However, Marie Claire's circulation was up 2% amid of sea of declines in the overall women's monthly market.
"The ABCs were a funny old set of figures and some of them were pretty grim," said a source close to the company.
Potential issues over the media group's defined benefit pension scheme could be holding up the sale deal. Time Inc UK had a £32.4m deficit in the scheme in its most recent accounts, to 31 December 2016. It posted sales down 5.3% at £246.9m while operating profit slumped by almost 36% to £18.4m. The pre-tax loss was £16.8m due to a raft of exceptional charges including £19m in reorganisation costs and a £2.1m write-off caused by the bankruptcy of Polestar, which had been Time Inc UK's sole print supplier before it went bust in April 2016.
Epiris describes its investment strategy as targeting "control positions in UK-centric companies with an enterprise value of between £75m and £500m and in which we can invest between £40m and £150m of equity.
"Typically we invest in companies whose quality is reflected in a high profit margin, which are cash-generative, and which operate in fragmented sectors with plentiful acquisition targets. Occasionally, the companies we back are in need of reinvigoration, which our investment strategy is designed to deliver."
Both Time Inc UK and Epiris declined to comment.
